Ijcai writing style

IJCAI Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. IJCAI rewards clear, significant, original AI work that a broad program committee can evaluate quickly.

Revision rules

• Put the AI contribution in the first page: problem, gap, core idea, evidence, and why it matters beyond a narrow benchmark.
• Keep the submission self-contained; supplementary material should support, not rescue, the main argument.
• Spend the 7-page body on claims reviewers can verify: formal setup, method, theorem or algorithm, baselines, ablations, and limitations.
• Use third-person citation language for prior work by the authors and remove acknowledgements, contribution statements, and identity-revealing phrasing from the review version.
• Include an ethics or broader-impact statement when sensitive data, high-stakes deployment, safety, discrimination, privacy, consent, copyright, or societal harm is plausible.
• Treat LLM assistance conservatively. Style polishing may be acceptable in some cycles, but LLM-written manuscript text, fake citations, or unverified claims can trigger rejection.

Writing for a cross-subfield committee

IJCAI's PC mixes symbolic AI, search, planning, KR, constraint reasoning, multi-agent, game theory, ML, NLP, and vision. Write so a reviewer outside your niche reaches the contribution fast, because the out-of-area reviewer often drives summary-reject risk.

Reader risk	Symptom in the draft	Page-discipline fix
Out-of-area reviewer lost early	Contribution buried after a long formal preamble	State problem, gap, and claim on page one
Notation overload	New symbols before motivation	Introduce notation only when the claim needs it
Niche jargon	Subfield acronyms undefined	Define on first use; assume a broad AI reader
Body overflow	Method spills toward the reference pages	Move proofs and grids to the appendix, keep claims in the body

Worked vignette: framing a KR paper for breadth

A knowledge-representation paper opens with three paragraphs of description-logic preliminaries before naming its contribution. A planning or learning reviewer may summary-reject for unclear significance. The fix: open with the reasoning task, why current encodings fall short, and the new tractable fragment, then defer the heavy formalism. The technical depth stays; only the ordering changes so a broad IJCAI reader sees the payoff within two reads.

Reviewer pushback and the venue-specific fix

• "Could not find the contribution." Rewrite the first page as problem, gap, idea, evidence, significance; this is the single highest-leverage IJCAI edit.
• "Reads like a journal extension." Compress to the body limit and cite the longer work in third person rather than reproducing it.
• "Significance only within one benchmark." Add a sentence on why the result matters across AI, not just on the chosen suite.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / overloaded / underspecified / policy-risky
[First-page fix] <new framing>
[Compression cuts] <what to move or delete>
[Anonymity edits] <phrases to rewrite>
[Ethics/reproducibility edits] <specific additions>